Baby, I Love You

I continue to be severely stressed out about the state of America and the world, and I continue to reach to Aretha Franklin for emotional support. This week I soothed myself by studying “Baby, I Love You” from her 1967 album Aretha Arrives.

The song is by Ronnie Shannon, who also wrote “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You”. The guitar is by Jimmy Johnson or Joe South, or possibly both of them. Tommy Cogbill plays bass, Roger Hawkins plays drums, and Spooner Oldham plays electric piano. The horn section includes Charles Chalmers and King Curtis on tenor saxophone, Tony Studd on bass trombone, and Melvin Lastie on trumpet. The backing vocals are by Aretha’s sisters Carolyn and Erma Franklin, along with Aretha herself overdubbed on the chorus.

Here’s my chart.

As with all Aretha Franklin songs, there is an inviting and accessible surface supported by immense sophistication and depth. Let’s dig in.

The song’s tempo is an unhurried 90-93 beats per minute, with moderate sixteenth note swing. The drums tick steadily along on eighth notes, and the bass mostly does too, but once in a while, Tommy Cogbill takes a note that you were expecting on beat 3 or 4 and anticipates it by a sixteenth note. The electric piano consistently accents the sixteenth before beat three, and the guitar sometimes hits the sixteenth after beat three (for example, in the first two bars.) That adds up to a groove that is generally stable but also has plenty of internal friction.

Harmonically, the song seems simple: it’s all on G7, C7 and D7, the basic blues chords in G. However, the timing of the chord changes interacts with the phrase structure in some unpredictable ways. The song starts with a two-measure intro. That flows seamlessly into verse one, which I hear having two subsections: an eight bar front half, and a five bar back half. I am not totally sure about the length of that second part; at first I thought it was only four bars, and that the chorus started on the line “I love you”, because that’s where the chord change from C7 back to G7 happens.  But now I think the chorus starts where the backing vocals enter. That makes the chorus six bars long, followed by a repeat of the two-bar intro at the end of it. This hearing means that the chord change fights the sense of a section change. Or maybe there is no chorus at all and it’s all just one long verse? That’s how the chart in The New Real Book writes it. Either way, the hypermeter is turning around in here; it’s intriguingly ambiguous.

Aretha’s vocal melody uses a pitch collection that combines G Mixolydian and G Dorian modes, and many of the thirds fall in between B-flat and B-natural, in keeping with the harmonic conventions of the blues. I colored those ambiguous thirds blue in my chart. The vocal melody does not really acknowledge the chord changes as they go by. For example, Aretha sings F over C7, not as a suspension that resolves to E, but as a seemingly stable note. (Something similar happens in “They Say I’m Different” by Betty Davis.) Aretha continues singing “tonic” melody notes over the D7 chords as well, with one conspicuous exception: the unaccompanied vocal break in the chorus. In measure 20 on the “and” of 3, she sings an unmistakeable F-sharp, which makes a rich augmented sound against the prominent B-flat she starts that measure off with. Hip! We will get to the fascinating rhythm of this measure below.

Another source of rhythmic intrigue is the placement of the accents in the phrase “baby, I love you” as it repeats through the song. In measure 15, the end of the verse, the accent is on “I”. In the backing vocals in measure 16, the start of the chorus, the accent is on “baby”. In measure 18, the accent is on “love.” In the backing vocals in measure 19, the accent is on “baby” again. All these accents have been on downbeats. But then in measure 20, the break, the real fun begins. From here on, all accents are on the word “love”. The first one is on the downbeat of measure 20 where you would expect it. But then the accents fall on the “and” of 2 and the “and” of 4 of measure 20, and on the “and” of 2 of measure 21. Finally, the final “love” is back on the downbeat of measure 22. The “love” accents divide up the two-bar break into segments of three eighths, four eighths, four eighths, and five eighths. That is wild! I find the third “I love you” to be especially destabilizing, because I’d expect the “love” to fall on the downbeat of measure 21, but it’s anticipated. Also, the final “baby” is on the sixteenth note subdivision before beat four, and that is an extremely weak beat, especially after you’ve been floating along without the rhythm section for so long. I would have had a terrible time puzzling all this out if I couldn’t visualize it on the metrical grid in Ableton. Here’s a MIDI visualization of the passage, with pink markers on the accents:

Kate Heidemann’s dissertation, Hearing Women’s Voices in Popular Song: Analyzing Sound and Identity in Country and Soul, has a lot of in-depth analysis of “Baby, I Love You.” First, she goes deep into Aretha’s vocal technique.

The first generally applicable vocal quality I notice is the graininess… of Franklin’s voice as she sings “if you want my lovin” (0:05-0:09)… The lower range of this opening line also brings to mind some of the resonant “depth” that I identified in [Gladys] Knight’s voice, but in Franklin’s voice this resonance is tempered by the feeling that I get of vibrations higher in my throat more than my chest when I attempt to imitate her. I imagine the resonance of her voice being produced simply through an immense volume of air passing her vocal folds, while I imagine the graininess as produced by a relatively neutral position of the vocal apparatus (as in prepared for speaking or yelling, rather than a clear, hollow singing sound). One of Franklin’s great abilities as a vocalist is that she can retain this vocal quality into a high register, when one would normally switch to a style of vocal production that feels more resonant (referred to as head voice). My sense of deep resonance and the grainy hiss of the throat elicits associations of sensuality, while my association of an everyday speaking voice with my imagining of the locus of Franklin’s voice brings to mind a sense of naturalness and frankness. At the outset then, I hear Franklin’s vocal quality as conveying an easygoing sensuality.

As Franklin sings louder or in a higher range, the grainy yet resonant quality of her voice persists, but the nasal quality of her voice becomes more pronounced and piercing. This happens more frequently as the song progress, as Franklin’s delivery become incrementally more forceful. One example of this nasal quality occurs as she sings the line “all you got to do is snap your fingers, and I’ll come a-runnin’ I ain’t lyin’” (1:12-1:20), especially on the words “I’ll” and “lyin’.” I imagine a similar quality as originating from vibrations high in my throat, where my soft palate is squeezed—brought about partly by a widening of the mouth and throat, as if one were squashing an “o” shape—to redirect sound into the nasal cavity. The placement of my soft palate feels distinctly different in this position than when I open my pharynx (as if yawning) to produce a mellow and clear vocal sound (as is more common in classical-style vocal production).When speaking, my soft palate feels more relaxed and in a lowered position; I relate the position of my soft palate as I imitate Franklin’s voice to its position when I’m speaking in a normal tone, and therefore think of her vocal quality in these moments as nasal yet relaxed, even when she is singing with considerable force (pp. 73-74).

Heidemann points out that Aretha’s distinctive timbre is partially the result of her mic technique, because she intentionally clips out her recording level to create attractive analog distortion. The combination of Aretha’s effortless vocal technique and her mastery of studio technology makes her sound “solid and dominant rather than frail and submissive” (p. 75). It’s also worth noticing that it’s the recording gear that is doing the “breaking”, not Aretha’s own voice.

Heidemann also attributes Aretha’s sense of power to her rhythmic play, the way that she freely places words on or off the beat, and clips or stretches vowels. The break in measures 20 and 21 in particular add to the impression of Aretha as “commanding and musically dominant” (p. 175). Heidemann cites Farah Jasmine Griffin on black female vocality: “It is a tradition that seeks to, in fact needs to, communicate beyond words when they are no longer capable of rendering meaning” (p. 108). The particular words that Aretha is singing matter, but not as much as the way she sings them.

Heidemann also gets into a discussion of the contrast between Aretha’s agency in the studio and the lack of official acknowledgment of that agency. She got her first co-producer credit on Amazing Grace, five years after “Baby, I Love You”, but she was in a producer role long before that. She selected, wrote and arranged songs, and gave input on takes and mixes. However, she did not have check-signing authority and was up against the general sexism of the music industry. Heidemann listens to “Baby, I Love You” not just as a playful love song, then, but also as a statement of Black feminism, an assertion of authority. That could explain the song’s attraction for me: I would feel better having Aretha Franklin in charge.